What if you spent a morning pulling scallions from the soil and washing beets in a metal sink?
The first seven years we dolled ourselves up as witches in black nylon and swampy grease paint.
I'm going to abandon everything / after this poem
Had a dream he was chained to a mountain while a buzzard ate his liver.
By the time Zoe and I started down the Overseas Highway, we had been living a nomadic lifestyle out of our 1995 Corolla for nearly four months.
What dispossessed me sat erect beside the checked quilt in fishnets.
Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.
Calvin felt calm.
He thought about God.
& no I'm still not thirsty / although i find myself / thinking too frequently / about jagerbombs
Writers are running out of good guy badges. Virtue signaling shame ponies and other cultural nyet.
I got my dad’s big nose and people make fun of me for it.
[victory lobe]
tiny towns or a dog could keep me pleased
for six months, then I’d wear felt triangles
look like December, have needles on me
molt on the plane to the
Because anytime is the right time for a haiku.
See John's last Adventure Comic, "The Lucky Texan," here!
I sent a text to my father, telling him I saw three coyotes. My father is an admirer of the natural world. I sent another text about a nearby house that had been abandoned. I'd noticed the word “SATAN” scrawled across the front door with blue paint that morning.
Ted had started the holidays in Aspen. Well, in the jail in Aspen, awaiting trial for a murder he’d committed in Snowmass.
It's the kind of world that makes you vomit well into sobriety.
In the dark we weren’t afraid to show our ugly selves. We admitted we loathed giving up our seats to old people and the pregnant. Don’t you just hate reading? We both said at the same time.
My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.
We left after midnight. We entered the forest, dark and green all around us, hundreds of miles deep. Woven together in the little cocoon of our car, our world was as large as the headlight beams in the dark forest.
Understand, neurotic perfectionists are mostly calculated
For four days in 1997 I was a beam of light. Fuck off if you don’t believe me: I lit shit up. Daniel Ladinsky says Hafiz says, “The oil in the lamp the sun burns come from forests you once were, from rich deposits you left [behind],” but he was probably speaking metaphorically.
The next day I send the above photo to a friend in Michigan. She asks if I'm fine. And what the doctor recommended. My response is typed laughter. I tell her I've been taking it easy. Staying medicated. But the chance of seeing a doctor is slim. The hospitals are over run. She's a little surprised. It's contrary to what she's been told.
